Just came back from Bali. First trip as a married couple, which still sounds strange to say out loud.
And if I’m being honest with you, the two months before this trip were A LOT.
In eight weeks: decided to get married, sorted wedding logistics, met with a celebrant and photographer (both friend recommendations), lodged the notice of intended marriage, navigated a partner visa application with a lawyer, planned an international trip, and somehow kept showing up to work and practising Spanish through all of it.
No extended engagement. No year of planning. No elaborate reception.
Just a tight deadline, a clear reason, and the realisation that constraints are secretly one of the most useful things that can happen to you.
Today in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ How a tight deadline clarifies what actually matters versus what you think should matter
✔️ The three-system approach that gave me somewhere to stand when things got overwhelming
✔️ Why “simple” still needs a plan – and what I cut to make it work
Doable ideas 💭
If you have a big project coming up – a move, a career change, a life admin mountain – try building a simple traffic light tracker before you start.
Three columns. Green: done. Amber: in progress. Red: not started or blocked.
List every building block of the project, assign it a colour, and update it weekly.
That’s it. No elaborate system. Just a way to see the whole picture at a glance so your brain stops holding it all at once.
I used Claude to build mine with milestone checklists for both the visa application and the wedding logistics. Seeing everything mapped out didn’t make the list shorter. It just made it less terrifying.
Reflections 🪞
When you’re planning something big, how much of what ends up on your list is genuinely necessary – and how much is what you think you’re supposed to do?
What’s one thing you could cut from a current project that society told you was mandatory but your gut knows is optional?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
Here’s what a tight deadline actually does: it removes the option of “nice to have.”
When I started thinking about the wedding, the usual noise showed up immediately. “You should have a big reception.” “People expect a sit-down dinner.” “Isn’t a year-long engagement the normal timeline?” The script was loud, same as it always is.
But we had eight weeks. So the question stopped being “what do people usually do?” and became “what do we actually need for this to be meaningful?”
Turns out: a celebrant, a photographer, a small group of people we love, a bouquet of fake flowers that looked so good nobody noticed, and a friend who DJs. The notice of intended marriage only requires five weeks’ lodgement. We lodged it and kept moving.
Every “what most people do” that didn’t make the cut wasn’t a loss. It was clarity.
The visa application was a different kind of project – more moving parts, longer timeline, higher stakes. For that, I leaned on our lawyer to manage the complexity and trusted my partner to own his documents and his process. I handled my end: the sponsorship evidence, the identification, my financial records. We each had a lane. We stayed in it.
For Bali, I built a shared Notion kanban board – itinerary by day, simple to-do list, both of us able to comment and update in real time. Nothing elaborate. Just a shared source of truth so we weren’t repeating the same logistics conversations over and over.
None of these systems made everything smooth. But they gave me somewhere to put things down so I wasn’t carrying it all in my head.
The moment I had to remember what all of this was for wasn’t when I was choosing flowers or finalising the ceremony. It was sitting at my parents’ place, talking about wedding details, Colombia, visa fees, money, family expectations – quietly doing the maths in my head.
“This is going to stress us out.”
And then having to pull myself back. The point wasn’t to make this seamless. The point was that we were choosing a life together. And some parts of choosing a life together are deeply unglamorous.
Three things I wrote down somewhere in those eight weeks:
“Stress doesn’t mean the relationship is wrong.”
“Simple weddings still need plenty of planning.”
“Systems don’t remove the hard parts. They give you somewhere to stand when the hard parts arrive.”
Not revelations. Just reminders. The kind you need when you’re in the middle of something that matters and it’s messier than you thought it would be.
If you’re in the middle of something like that right now – a big decision, a logistical mountain, a season where everything is happening at once- the goal isn’t to make it feel easy. The goal is to make it survivable. Clear lanes. A simple tracker. One decision at a time. And a reason underneath it all that’s worth the unglamorous parts.
Bali was wonderful, by the way. That’s a story for another week.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
The goal determines the path. Higher goals have less viable options, making them a much sharper and finer filter for the few pathways that could actually work.
– Benjamin Hardy
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